Quentin Tarantino Says This Free-to-Stream Classic Thriller is “As good as studio filmmaking ever gets”
Quentin Tarantino loves movies far more than most. He doesn’t just watch them. he eats, sleeps, and breathes cinema. Accordingly the writer/director is quite knowledgeable about noteworthy cinematic efforts from years past. In fact, you might say he wrote the book on it. Because he basically did.
Tarantino’s book Cinema Speculation chronicles a variety of standout historic offerings with which the director connected. Through the tome, he dives into a lot of his influences and serves up plenty of quality recommendations within.
One film Tarantino speaks especially fondly of through the pages of Cinema Speculation is an Edmund Goulding picture he thinks deserves even more acclaim than it tends to get.
The Pulp Fiction director has this to say about the motion picture in question: “While Nightmare Alley is rightly considered a classic, I still think it’s underrated. To me, Nightmare Alley is as good as studio filmmaking ever gets. Tyrone Power (who I’ve never been fond of) is f–king sensational in the movie. And the script adaptation by Jules Furthman (one of my handful of nominees for greatest Hollywood screenwriter of all time) is excellent.”
Where is this Quentin Tarantino-approved noir thriller available to stream?
Nightmare Alley is currently available to watch via the streaming service Hoopla. In case you’re unfamiliar, Hoopla is like Kanopy. It’s free to almost anyone with a library card. Hooray for that.
Screenwriter Jules Furthman adapted the script for Nightmare Alley from the 1946 William Lindsay Gresham novel of the same name.
The picture stars Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, and Helen Walker.
The setup for Nightmare Alley goes as follows:
Roustabout Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power) joins a traveling carny and unsuccessfully schemes to figure out the mind-reading act of Mademoiselle Zeena (Joan Blondell) and her alcoholic husband, Pete (Ian Keith). But when Pete dies, Zeena is forced to take on Stanton as a partner, and he quickly proves more gifted than his predecessor. Ambitious to a fault, Carlisle abandons Zeena and the carny to reinvent himself as The Great Stanton, wowing high-class audiences in a Chicago hotel.
That is just about all I have for you at present, dear reader. Do be sure to stay tuned to Dread Central in the near future for more stimulating recommendations from your favorite cinematic luminaries as we successfully unearth them. If you fancy the idea of keeping up with me on social media, you can find me on Threads @FunWithHorror.
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